How It Works

The rocrate-validator is designed to validate RO-Crates against predefined validation profiles. A validation profile is a set of validation rules, or checks, which are applied to the RO-Crate. If the RO-Crate conforms to all the rules, then it is deemed valid; otherwise, errors will be generated for each rule that failed to validate.

Non-conformance to a rule will result in an issue. On the CLI, issues will be presented as error messages, with references to the specific rule which triggered the error. Note that multiple rules may have the same error message, which can result in output with apparently duplicate errors.

rocrate-validator is limited to validating conformance to RO-Crate profiles for which validation rules have been implemented. In the absence of any matching validation profiles, rocrate-validator may return an error or request the user to manually select a validation profile to apply.

Validation profiles can be related by inheritance – i.e., where one validation profile extends another one. For instance, Workflow Testing RO-Crate extends Workflow RO-Crate.

Validation profile selection

  • Automatic Profile Matching (default): By default, rocrate-validator will attempt to select the correct validation profiles for the input RO-Crate based on the conformsTo property of the Root Data Entity.

    • If a precise match is found for the conformsTo property, that profile is selected for validation.

    • If no precise match is found:

      • in Interactive Mode: (available only through the CLI) the system will prompt the user to select a profile from the list of profiles to which the RO-Crate conforms;

      • in Non-Interactive Mode: the system will validate against all profiles to which the RO-Crate conforms, and for which validation rules are available. In all cases, input RO-Crates are validated against the base ro-crate profile.

  • Profile Versions:

    • It may happen that the RO-Crate profile version to which the input RO-Crate conformsTo does not match the version of the implemented validation profile. In this case, the validator will validate against the highest available version of the profile that is lower than the one requested. Thus, the validator will avoid applying a validation profile that is newer than the conformsTo profile. This behaviour can be overridden by manually selecting the desired validation profile (see below).

    Note

    Profile versions are identified by matching the trailing version number in the profile identifier, if present. For instance, the identifier for the ro-crate profile version 1.0 is ro-crate-1.0, while the profile name without a version is simply ro-crate.

  • Manual Profile Selection:

    The user can always override the automatic selection of validation profiles by specifying (via CLI or API) which profile to use.